CHAPTER NINE

 

 

May 14, 2015

8:45 A.M.

McCall, Idaho

 

They had a great breakfast in the lodge of eggs, bacon, and homemade bread as they sat looking out over the smooth blue waters of the lake. The weather was crisp and there was frost on the ground, but the day promised to be sunny. Lott had watched the weather and knew a small storm was scheduled to come through during the night, but nothing bad, and the next day was to be clear and sunny as well.

Then they filled up the gas in the Jeep, got some snacks from a grocery store, and called both Fleet and Annie to tell them they were headed out.

“Drive carefully,” Fleet had said.

Lott had assured him he would and they set up a time to contact Fleet and Annie the next afternoon, since they planned on staying at Trish’s house for the night, even if she wasn’t there.

The road that headed east toward Trish’s place turned bad almost from the start. The moment they left McCall, the pavement ended and the road turned to gravel. It was wide and Lott could make good time on it, avoiding the chatter bumps where he could.

There was some traffic, but not much after they were twenty miles out of town.

For the first hour the road kept climbing gently up a valley with mountains that towered over both sides of them, mostly covered in pine trees. As they got higher, the road got narrower and narrower as the valley narrowed down. They crossed back and forth over a fast-moving stream with spring runoff coming off the mountains.

Snow still clung to areas of shade under the trees and in the ditch along the road. And ahead they could see snow-covered peaks. Lott had no idea if they were traveling into trouble or not.

Just after two hours, the road peaked over a tall summit with a sign that said, “Road Open.”

“Good to know,” Julia said, shaking her head with a worried look.

They were so high, Lott could feel the thinness of the air.

From the sign, the road stayed along the top of the ridge of rock and scattered scruffy pine trees for a short while and then started down a cliff-face, far, far too steep for anything but brush to grow on.

The road, if that was the right term for the goat trail they were on, was barely wide enough for their Jeep and there were no guardrails at all. The road seemed to be cut out of the cliff face and twisted in and out of any tiny crevice in the hillside.

Once Lott had started down the road, there was no place to stop or even think of turning around.

Talk about feeling trapped.

He wasn’t sure if he was up for this kind of stress, but at the moment they clearly had no choice.

On Julia’s side, the drop had to be a good two thousand feet down into a tree-covered valley floor, the trees so tiny below they looked like kids’ toys.

She was holding on to the door handle beside her so tight, her knuckles were white.

Lott gripped the steering wheel in the same fashion. He had no memory of ever driving something like this road, and he was more worried about meeting another car coming up than anything else.

After the longest forty-five minutes he had ever spent, he had managed to creep down that excuse of a goat trail to the valley floor where the road widened beside a mountain river.

Neither of them had said a word the entire time.

Julia managed to pry her fingers from the door handle and took a deep breath. “How about we stop and let me just kiss the ground a few times.”

Lott laughed, feeling more relieved than he wanted to admit. “My driving that bad?”

“Great driving,” she said as he pulled over. “Shit excuse for a road.”

With that he could only laugh and agree and not say anything about the fact that he was pretty certain they needed to go back out that way as well. When Fleet had said this was remote, he hadn’t been kidding in the slightest.

And if Fleet had warned them about that stretch of cliff road, neither Lott or Julia would have driven in here. Or at least Lott hoped he would have been smart enough to not try it.

They rested in a wide area beside the loud, rushing river before moving on. The sky up through the mountain peaks was bright blue, but the air felt very cold.

The side road to Trish’s home cut off the main road about ten miles of winding gravel road farther down the valley.

Her road was back to a one-way dirt goat track and it wound up a narrow canyon until it topped over a small summit. The climb wasn’t that far and thankfully, with mountains on both sides, it didn’t feel that bad.

Much better than driving along a cliff face. Nothing could match that cliff drive in pure terror factor.

Just over the summit, in front of them was a deep blue mountain lake that seemed to almost sparkle in the afternoon sunlight. It was fairly large and filled the bowl between two tall mountains covered in pine and rock.

From where the road came over the top of the hill, the water was only about a hundred feet below the edge of the gravel.

Lott could see that the road wound down along the lake to a large log structure on the far side of the blue water. A long dock stuck out into the water at the end of a path from the building.

“Wow!” Julia said. “No wonder Trish wanted to live up here.”

Lott had to agree. It was stunningly beautiful.

And isolated.

Very, very, very isolated.